I feel like its been a bad week, right? Between the crash—or shoot down—of MH 17 (with nearly 100 WHO HIV/AIDS researchers aboard) and events in Gaza with Israel, it sort of seems like it couldn’t get much worse.

Legislators aired doubts over a U.S. health agency’s pledge to remedy problems tied to its management of disease agents,Reuters reports.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is weighing the creation of an autonomous auditor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the news agency reported on Thursday. The medical agency came under congressional scrutiny after a June safety breach initially spurred fears that dozens of workers could have been exposed to anthrax at its Atlanta headquarters. The incident preceded the discovery of numerous additionalviolations of rules for handling infectious pathogens.

The Energy and Commerce Committee reportedly is also considering the establishment of new, nationwide laboratory guidelines that one federal entity would be responsible for overseeing.

The other day, I wrote a “fake” news story at ScrappleFace.com about the Centers for Disease Control’s “discovery” of a lot of highly-infectious stuff — hundreds of vials of small pox, influenza, den (RT @Scott_Ott: Life Imitates Satire: How can a…

Job Req.: 303451Position Title: Post Doctorate RA – Data Sciences and AnalyticsDescription : A 1+ years postdoctoral position is available in the Data Sciences and Analytics Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The decommissioning of Syria’s vast chemical weapon arsenal has brought its weapons of mass destruction into the media spotlight. Far less attention has been paid to Syria’s admitted biological warfare program, one of the …

3 Questions: Kenneth Oye on the regulation of genetic engineering MIT News Kenneth Oye, an associate professor of political science and engineering systems who studies government regulation and directs MIT’s Program on Emerging Technologies, is…